Information Course Schedule fall 2009

Upper-Division

How can we critically think about emergent phenomena of the Internet? Is the Internet a democratic medium for political action (a "networked public sphere") or a surveillance apparatus of centralized control? Who has access to digital information and what techniques are used to make information artificially scarce? How do trade group lawsuits against digital "piracy" affect a generation's perception of the law? Should we look at the growing sphere of copyright as a public interest problem, or celebrate the expansion of creators' rights? Can free software thrive independently from ideological backing? Why are peer production communities like Wikipedia and Linux affected by extreme gender disparity?

In this course, we will examine the societal implications of computer networks from critical and technical perspectives. We will collectively engage with issues of intellectual property, access to information, privacy, freedom of speech, representation, and peer production. We will be discussing provocative texts and media, doing hands-on exploration of emerging technologies, and practicing ethnographic fieldwork in online communities. We will also offer opportunities for field trips and guest speakers to provide us with different perspectives. Additionally, students will engage in a semester-long collaborative project in a flexible format.

This is a student-initiated group study course (DE-Cal). Please contact the student coordinator(s) for specific questions.

Core

8 weeks; 3 hours of lecture per week. This course introduces the intellectual foundations of information organization and retrieval: conceptual modeling, semantic representation, vocabulary and metadata design, classification, and standardization, as well as information retrieval practices, technology, and applications, including computational processes for analyzing information in both textual and non-textual formats.

7 weeks - 4 hours of laboratory per week. This course introduces software skills used in building prototype scripts for applications in data science and information management. The course gives an overview of procedural programming, object-oriented programming, and functional programming techniques in the Python scripting language, together with an overview of fundamental data structures, associated algorithms, and asymptotic performance analysis. Students will watch a set of instructional videos covering material and will have four hours of laboratory-style course contact each week.

General

Three hours of lecture per week. Policy and technical issues related to insuring the accuracy and privacy of information. Encoding and decoding techniques including public and private key encryption. Survey of security problems in networked information environment including viruses, worms, trojan horses, Internet address spoofing.

Three hours of lecture per week. The philosophical, legal, historical, and economic analysis of the need for and uses of laws protecting intellectual property. Topics include types of intellectual property (copyright, patent, trade secrecy), the interaction between law and technology, various approaches (including compulsory licensing), and the relationship between intellectual property and compatibility standards.

Three hours of lecture. The Extensible Markup Language (XML), with its ability to define formal structural and semantic definitions for metadata and information models, is the key enabling technology for information services and document-centric business models that use the Internet and its family of protocols. This course introduces XML syntax, transformations, schema languages, and the querying of XML databases. It balances conceptual topics with practical skills for designing, implementing, and handling conceptual models as XML schemas.

Three hours of lecture
per week. Letter grade to fulfill degree requirements. Prerequisites:
Proficient programming in Python (programs of at least 200 lines of
code), proficient with basic statistics and probabilities. This course
examines the state-of-the-art in applied Natural Language Processing
(also known as content analysis and language engineering), with an
emphasis on how well existing algorithms perform and how they can be
used (or not) in applications. Topics include part-of-speech tagging,
shallow parsing, text classification, information extraction,
incorporation of lexicons and ontologies into text analysis, and
question answering. Students will apply and extend existing software
tools to text-processing problems.

Students will receive no credit for C262 after taking 290 section 4. Three hours of lecture and
one hour of laboratory per week. This course explores the theory and practice of Tangible User Interfaces, a new approach to Human Computer Interaction that focuses on the physical interaction with computational media. The topics covered in the course include theoretical framework, design examples, enabling technologies, and evaluation of Tangible User Interfaces. Students will design and develop experimental Tangible User Interfaces using physical computing prototyping tools and write a final project report. Also listed as New Media C262.

Seminar

One hour colloquium per week. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prerequisites: Ph.D. standing in the School of Information. Colloquia, discussion, and readings designed to introduce students to the range of interests of the school.